What We're Reading

I can’t tell you that gold is a bad investment. Even after the recent plunge, if you bought gold in 2004, your investment would have earned you an annualized rate of about 10.4 percent, after accounting for inflation. That is darned impressive. If you bought in 1994, it would have earned about 3.9 percent per year -- not too shabby. Even if you bought all the way back in 1984, you would have earned 1.8 percent in real terms. (Of course, this assumes that shadowstats.com is wrong, and that inflation hasn’t been massively understated.)

In addition to delivering decent long-term returns, gold has been a way to spread or offset investment risk. As my co-blogger Yichuan Wang showed last year, gold’s return is somewhat negatively correlated with interest rates, so that a bet on gold is to some degree a bet on lower rates. This is actually the prediction of some old economic models, which also indicate that gold should have a positive rate of return over the long term. But a lot of the varia

• Stocktwits: "investor say the bottom is in for gold"
• Hey, wait a minute.  Didn't StockBuz say watch for a gold (GLD) weekly right shoulder to form back in March and early April?  Even posting on the gold miners here.  We're ahead of the herd once again......maybe.   (click image to enlarge)  At least risk is minimal; stop below $120
• SINA pre-announced an earnings beat but also announced it has received two notices from Chinese regulators stating its "License for Online Transmission of Audio-Visual Programs would be revoked due to certain unhealthy and indecent content from third-parties or by users" on Sina.com and its affiliated online literature site.  Ouch!
• JPMorgan becomes the first to warn on trading revenues in Q2, expecting markets revenue to slip 20% after declining 17% in Q1.
• AAPL wins a Federal jury decision again Samsung on smart phone patients but it's a victory for Samsung with less than 10% sought, actually being awarded ($120m vs. $2bil).  The jury rejected Ap

Today was a typical Saturday.  I began to scan my watchlist, ran through the indexes and flipped through my favorite web pages for tidbits of stockmarket insight.   At one point I noticed that in wake of yesterdays selloff in gold/silver, suddenly people were posting seasonal charts for gold and silver.....as if they had just been discovered.  Helllllo McFly.   No, there is no seasonal demand for  the shiny stuff here.  Hasn't been; move along.  Economies are healing; meaning there's less of a need to hedge yourself with gold and bonds.  With no demand and less of a flight to safety,the big boys are taking profits.  Again, nothing there, move along.

I think some people just stopped paying attention but world economies are less bad, period.  While we're not out of the woods, unemployment is stabilizing.  Jobs are coming back, albeit slowly and low paying...but things are no longer deteriorating.  Maybe the gurus out there just didn't want their subscribers to know the secret to their a